Rosalind W. Picard

Rosalind Wright Picard (born May 17, 1962) is an American scholar and inventor who is Professor of Media Arts and Sciences at MIT, founder and director of the Affective Computing Research Group at the MIT Media Lab, and co-founder of the startups Affectiva and Empatica. She has received many recognitions for her research and inventions. In 2005, she was named a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers for contributions to image and video analysis and affective computing. 

In 2019 she received one of the highest professional honors accorded an engineer, election to the National Academy of Engineering for her contributions on affective computing and wearable computing. In 2021 she was recognized as a Fellow of the ACM for contributions to physiological signal sensing for individual health and wellbeing. In 2021 she was elected to the National Academy of Inventors, which recognizes outstanding inventions that have made a tangible impact on quality of life, economic development and the welfare of society. 

In 2022 she was awarded the International Lombardy Prize for Computer Science Research which carries a €1 million award, which she donated to support digital health and neurology research to help save the lives of people with epilepsy and children susceptible to sudden infant death syndrome. Picard is credited with starting the branch of computer science known as affective computing with her 1997 book of the same name. This book described the importance of emotion in intelligence, the vital role human emotion communication has to relationships between people, and the possible effects of emotion recognition by robots and wearable computers. 

Her work in this field has led to an expansion into autism research and developing devices that could help humans recognize nuances in human emotions. Picard holds a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering with highest honors and a certificate in computer engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology (1984), and master's (1986) and doctorate degrees (1991), both in electrical engineering and computer science, from MIT. Her thesis was titled Texture Modeling: Temperature Effects on Markov/Gibbs Random Fields. 

She has been a member of the faculty at the MIT Media Laboratory since 1991, with tenure since 1998 and a full professorship since 2005. Picard is a researcher in the field of affective computing and the founder and director of the Affective Computing Research Group at the MIT Media Lab. The Affective Computing Research Group develops tools, techniques, and devices for sensing, interpreting, and processing emotion signals that drive state-of-the-art systems that respond intelligently to human emotional states. 

Applications of their research include improved tutoring systems and assistive technology for use in addressing the verbal communications difficulties experienced by individuals with autism. She also works with Sherry Turkle and Cynthia Breazeal in the field of social robots, and has published significant work in the areas of digital image processing, pattern recognition, and wearable computers. Picard's former students include Steve Mann, professor and researcher in wearable computers.